Once it's Part of the Furniture it Stays

Standing in the Entrance Gallery of the Shipwreck Museum you can see some of the alterations that have taken place since the 1850s. Firstly, the front door. If you look at old photographs of the front wall you will notice that the two doors, one at ground level and the next on the top floor, used to be the same width. It would appear that in the 1950s, the ground floor doorway was widened to accommodate the vehicles that used to back into the store. The floor used to be paved with jarrah blocks. However, in the 1950s forklifts were used inside and the floor was quickly found to be incapable of supporting their weight, so the blocks came up and concrete went down. Another legacy of the forklifts was the damage done to the limestone columns. Those beautiful facings on them are not original. When the building was being converted into a museum the columns were rendered to hide the damage caused by forklifts. Even earlier, possibly in the 1930s, the damage to the first two columns was so bad they were replaced by steel posts and the original arch supports with a steel beam.

When the building was being converted to a museum it was decided not to restore the floors, columns and doors to original standards because they were an integral part of the building and its history. The original Jarrah blocks can still be seen in the Hartog to de Vlamingh gallery.